Tuberculosis and other mycobacterial diseases

Section edited by Edward Graviss and Eyal Oren

This section aims to publish studies looking at all aspects of of the prevention, diagnosis and management of tuberculosis and other mycobacterial diseases in humans, including HIV-associated tuberculosis, as well as related molecular genetics, pathophysiology, and epidemiology.

The accuracy of different laboratory tests for diagnosis of diabetes mellitus (DM) and prediabetes (preDM) in populations exposed to tuberculosis (TB) remains poorly understood. Here, we examined the prevalenc...

Regimens that could treat both rifampin-resistant (RR) and rifampin-susceptible tuberculosis (TB) while shortening the treatment duration have reached late-stage clinical trials. Decisions about whether and ho...

Environmental bacteria, nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM), are recognized as one of the major human infection pathogens. NTM are prone to be mistaken as multidrug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis and challeng...

Leprosy continues to be a health problem in endemic areas. More than 200,000 new cases of leprosy per year suggest that transmission of the disease is still ongoing, presumably as airborne infection through na...

Tuberculosis (TB) is a leading cause of death in children and adults. Unlike for adults, there is paucity of data on childhood TB in several countries in Africa. The study objective was to assess the character...

Although the incidence of tuberculosis (TB) has decreased in South Korea, the mortality rate remains high. TB mortality is a key indicator for TB control interventions. The purpose of this study was to assess ...

At a time when programs were struggling to design effective regimens for the treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), the marketing authorization of bedaquiline and delamanid was a critical deve...

Isoniazid resistant tuberculosis is the most prevalent type of resistance in Swaziland and over two-thirds of the isoniazid resistant tuberculosis patients are tuberculosis and human immunodeficiency virus co-...

Nucleic acid amplification tests (NAAT) have been used as a diagnostic tool for pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) in Taiwan for many years. In accordance with Taiwanese legislation, health care personnel are requir...

In recent years, studies on the diagnostic accuracy of in-house real-time PCR (hRT-PCR) assay for the detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) have been reported with unignorable discrepancies. To assess the...

Extra-pulmonary tuberculosis (EPTB) represents about 14% of all cases of tuberculosis (TB) in Malaysia. The aims of the study include evaluation of socio-demographic factors, clinical manifestations, co-morbid...

Isoniazid (INH) represents the cornerstone for the treatment of cases infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) strains. Several molecular mechanisms have been shown to be the major causes for INH resistance...

Adolescents are a prime target group for tuberculosis (TB) vaccine trials that include prevention of infection (POI). The BCG vaccine is given at birth and does not prevent TB infection. TB infection, a critic...

Previous qualitative studies suggested that the false negative rate of the T cell spot test for tuberculosis infection (T-SPOT.TB) is associated with many risk factors in tuberculosis patients. However, more prec...

The neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NL ratio) has been reported to be a predictive biomarker of tuberculosis (TB). We assessed the association between the NL ratio and the incidence of active TB cases within 1...

The diagnoses of active smear negative PTB, remains difficult. As a result, treatment is often carried out empirically relaying on clinical criteria. The distribution and magnitude of smear negative PTB, smear...

Tuberculosis (TB) is the infectious disease that kills the most people worldwide. The use of geoepidemiological techniques to demonstrate the dynamics of the disease in vulnerable communities is essential for ...

Malnutrition and diabetes are risk factors for active tuberculosis (TB), possible risk factors for latent TB infection (LTBI), and may interact to alter their effect on these outcomes. Studies to date have not...

About 10% latent tuberculosis infections (LTBI) would progress to active tuberculosis (TB), if left prophylactic therapy. Tuberculin skin test (TST) is the most widely used method for LTBI screening in the sch...

The increased transmission of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis (TB) poses a challenge to tuberculosis prevention and control in Sri Lanka. Isoniazid (INH) is a key element of the first line anti tubercul...

China contributed 8.9% of all incident cases of tuberculosis globally in 2017, and understanding the spatiotemporal distribution of pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) in major transmission foci in the country is cri...

Early diagnosis of gastric tuberculosis is often challenging because the disease is very rare and its clinical manifestation is nonspecific and misleading. To raise the awareness and emphasize early diagnosis ...

Increasing multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) incidence is a major threat against TB eradication worldwide. We aim to conduct a detailed MDR-TB study in Portugal, an European country with endemic TB, co...

The increased incidence of drug-resistant TB is a major challenge for effective TB control. Limited therapeutic options and poor treatment outcomes of DR-TB may increase drug-resistance rates. The objective of...

Rapid and accurate diagnosis of childhood tuberculosis (TB) is challenging because children are often unable to produce the sputum sample required for conventional tests. Stool is an alternative sample type th...

In recent decades, Mycobacterium tuberculosis with the RDRio genotype, frequently isolated from tuberculosis patients in Rio de Janeiro, has become part of the Latin American – Mediterranean (LAM) family and has ...

Kazakhstan remains a high-burden TB prevalence country with a concomitent high-burden of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. For this reason, we performed an in depth genetic diversity and population structure cha...

Bedaquiline was recently introduced into World Health Organization (WHO)-recommended regimens for treatment of drug resistant tuberculosis. There is limited data on the long-term safety of bedaquiline. Because...

There is a pressing need for systematic approaches for monitoring how much TB treatment is ongoing in the private sector in India: both to cast light on the true scale of the problem, and to help monitor the p...

There is controversy regarding the relative influence of ‘exogenous’ versus ‘endogenous’ factors on the risk of progression from latent tuberculosis infection to active tuberculosis (TB) disease in children.

Leprosy is is still considered a public health issue and in Colombia 7–10% of new cases are found in children, indicating both active transmission and social inequality. We hypothesized that circulating antibo...

The island of Anjouan (Comoros) is highly endemic for leprosy with an annual incidence of 5–10/10,000. In May/June, 2015 single-dose Rifampicin post-exposure prophylaxis (SDR-PEP) was administered to 269 close...

The seasonality of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) incidence may indicate season-specific risk factors that could be controlled if they were better understood. The aims of this study were to elucidate how the inci...

A delayed initiation of tuberculosis treatment results in high morbidity, mortality, and increased person-to-person transmissions. The aim of this study was to assess treatment delay and its associated factors...

Tuberculosis (TB) is the leading cause of death from an infectious disease in Ethiopia, killing more than 30 thousand people every year. This study aimed to determine whether the rates of poor TB treatment out...

The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that Yemen has a high burden of drug resistance and a worrying shortage of implemented diagnostic methods and drug treatment regimens. Therefore, in this study,...

The multidrug therapy (MDT) for leprosy treatment adopted by Brazil in the 1990s was important for reducing leprosy in the country; however, recurrent cases remained problematic. Mechanisms involved in leprosy...

Leprosy typically manifests with skin and peripheral nerve involvement. Musculoskeletal complaints are the third most common, and can be the sole presenting manifestation. They range from arthralgia/arthritis ...

Mycolicibacterium phlei (M. phlei) is known to be a non-pathogenic nontuberculous mycobacterium (NTM) which rarely causes diseases in humans. A disseminated NTM infection is mostly caused by the Mycobacterium avi...

Information on non-tuberculosis mycobacterial (NTM) diseases remains limited in Singapore and other Southeast Asian countries. This study aimed to delineate epidemiological and clinical features of pulmonary N...

The study was conducted in a remote sputum sample collection sites and GeneXpert® MTB/RIF testing centers to detect Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Malawi. The main purpose of the study was to evaluate whether sput...